Quote collection
216 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say."
"It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse."
"Every great change is simple."
"I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever."
"The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE."
"Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. (excerpt from 'The Garrett')"
"A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations."
"When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary."
"The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!"
"The only history that matters is the history we know."
"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness."
"I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better."
"Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts."
"The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention."
"It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images."
"Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time."
"Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality."
"The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort."
"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."
"The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation."